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“I remember the days when everything was hosted in-house and third-party components were installed on our servers, and now it’s completely changed,” Ravindran says. “You have these APIs that work everywhere for every aspect of the solution stack, so it’s getting more and more complex to manage today. Everything is now connected to everything else.”
Yet without visibility, companies do not have full control over cloud applications, cannot adapt to performance issues, and gather intelligence on how users interact with the application.
Hard to see: User experience
As companies move their business infrastructures more online, the user’s experience, whether an employee or a customer, has become the most important metric for performance. When an app runs on a company-owned device, it has complete visibility into system performance and interactions with users. However, cloud applications have many components that are not under an organization’s control and may not offer an easy way to gather performance data and information about interactions. “The software supply chain that powers applications will likely rely more heavily on third-party code and services alone in the future,” says Vishal Chawla, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
“You can watch a lot of things, but the most relevant thing to watching is understanding what’s going on,” Chawla says. There are a lot of technologies that can help people untangle the clutter – for one, application performance monitoring and CASBs or cloud access security brokers, “but the question is, do you have an end-to-end strategy to be able to see everything that’s going on, and are you monitoring the relevant stuff? and don’t you watch things that aren’t relevant?”
In December 2021, the average web page required 74 requests to different resources to fully load on a desktop browser. Organizations today are managing more and more ways to interact with apps through APIs, with the average company managing more than 360 APIs. Third-party integrations and the expanding software supply chain have made monitoring performance even more difficult, with the average software application dependent on more than 500 different libraries and components.
Gaining and keeping visibility with the growing number of third parties is cumbersome creating blind spots in the application stack as they are beyond a company’s control. App performance is important, but gaining insight into the app experience from the user’s perspective has become even more critical.
On improving Thermo Fisher’s application performance, Ravindran says, “We look at our standards and make sure we capture what has been learned from these failures. We do a lot of ‘lessons learned’. And we usually try to keep the lights on, at least for now, and then make sure we handle it differently.”
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This content is produced by Insights, the exclusive content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editorial staff of MIT Technology Review.
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